Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
At that, I burst into tears, the stress of two whole days comes up and out of me at once, ugly and hiccupping. He doesn’t reach for me, I think he still doesn’t trust his hands, which hang at his sides with the fingers curled, so I must do the reaching. I grab two fists of damp wool and pull him over the threshold he hasn’t needed permission to cross in weeks, and I shut the door behind him against the cold that can hurt him now.
“You’re freezing,” I manage. “You’re actually freezing, you’re going to get hypothermia, you can get hypothermia now, oh my god, get by the fire—”
“Iris.”
“I mean it, this is a real problem now, this is a medical—”
“Iris.” And his hand comes up, slowly, watched by both of us, the hand that did what it did against that wall, and it stops short of my face, hovering, asking. I lean my cheek into it the last inch myself.
It’s warm.
Not warm like a normal man’s hand, not yet, since he’s still half-frozen, but under the chill of the skin there’s heat moving, blood moving, a temperature where there was always the loch’s cold, and at his wrist, against my jaw, I can feel a pulse. Small and fast and human, tapping away at me.
We stand there a long moment, his hand on my face, his pulse against my jaw.
“You’re warm,” I whisper.
“Aye.” His voice cracks down the middle of it. “It’s everywhere. I’m fucking freezing but I’m inside I’m actually warm. The warmth, the heart, the breath…I can’t stop any of it, it just goes and goes, it’s like living inside a bell that won’t stop ringing. Christ.” He laughs—shaky, winded, human—and then his face dissolves into anguish.
“I didn’t know if you’d open the door. I stood out there the whole walk telling myself you’d not open it. You’d seen what I—” He stops himself. Starts again, carefully. “The thing that used to make it easy is gone. You’ll have felt that. Whatever was in the air between us all this time, whatever it did to your wanting, it went down with the horse. So, I stood on your step and I knocked like a man, because that’s all I am now…and I don’t need to tell you, but a man can be left standing on a step.”
So he feels it too. The absence. The terrifying quiet where the pull used to be.
“I almost didn’t recognize my own kitchen today,” I say, swallowing thickly. “Everything’s so still. I kept looking at the bay and feeling nothing and thinking…what if it was all the glamour and only the glamour? What if I never, what if you never…” I can’t finish either. We’re both standing in the same fear from opposite sides.
“Aye. What if?”
The world seems to close in on us now, in the utter normalcy of the cottage with the logs settling in the wood stove and the fridge humming on.
Yet neither of us moves, because the next thing that happens between us will be the first thing that ever happened between us unassisted. That means no pull, no glamour, no bargain, no leash. Just two people, two humans, deciding how they feel about each other, deciding what to do next with their very mortal lives.
Two humans deciding to get to know each other, for real this time.
It’s the most frightening doorway I’ve ever stood in. Every other time, the water did the deciding, or the thing in him did, or the broken, yearning thing in me did. There’s nothing to blame it on now. If I go to him, it’s because I want to, and if he reaches for me, it’s because he wants to.
I look at him, really look, the way the illustrator in me has always looked, except even that feels different now, almost uncurated…it feels all mine.
I note the wet wool clinging to shoulders that are tense not still, at the hollow of his throat where a pulse is visibly going, at the water that soaks his hair black, and down a face that is tired—actually tired—with faint shadows under the eyes like a man who fought a loch and lost and yet lived. In a way he’s less beautiful than he was, as strange as that is to say. Whatever burnish the glamour put on him, that shimmery sheen of otherworldliness, has gone down with it, and what’s left is just a very fine-looking, handsome man in his apparent late thirties/early forties with a strong facial structure, a great body and good hair, shivering in my cottage, mortal as any day of the week.
And the wanting comes anyway.
It comes up slow, from somewhere real, no hook. It comes up the way warmth comes back into cold hands, painful and undeniable but mine, and I could cry with relief, because there’s my answer, there’s the damned test result. With every supernatural thumb off the scale, standing in plain lamplight looking at an earthly, dripping, breakable man, I want him. Not the lord of anything. Him.